Five reasons why Scott Alexander should love our definition of Cancel Culture

I agree that we need a good working definition. Here’s why I think ours is best.

Two things became inevitable after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump: Some people who don’t like Trump would make edgy social media posts about it, and some people who have chafed under Cancel Culture in left-leaning spaces for the last decade would call for cancellations in response. Just as with censorship more broadly, too many folks hate it when it’s done to them but can’t wait to do it to others once they have the chance.

This is the fair-weather devotion to principle and selective memory that keeps the culture war wheel spinning. 

However, I don't want to engage in hypocrisy projection here: an awful lot of folks who might be described as “anti-woke,” or critical of the excesses of social justice fundamentalism, have quite clearly and forcefully come out against this behavior — like Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog of “

Blocked and Reported

,” Konstantin Kisin, Colin Wright of the “

Reality's Last Stand

” Substack newsletter, Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie and Billy Binion, and of course FIRE staffers like Angel Eduardo and FIRE senior fellow Jacob Mchangama, just to name a few.

I also don’t want to pretend that the right and the left are suddenly equal on this, when frankly there has been a lot more cancel culture from the left in the past decade. Still, the tables are turning at the moment, and as my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author

Rikki Schlott

and I have argued, Cancel Culture is bad no matter who is doing it. This current moment should not be taken as an opportunity for the right to “catch up” or “even the score.”

For his

Astral Codex Ten

Substack newsletter, Scott Alexander wrote an excellent caution against these recent cancellations. Of particular note is the story of Darcy Waldron Pinckney, the Home Depot clerk who wrote, “Too bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!” on Facebook in response to the assassination attempt, and who was targeted by the conservative social media account Libs of TikTok and subsequently fired from her job as a result. Alexander’s piece primarily focuses on the arguments some conservatives and “anti-wokes” have made since transforming from critics of Cancel Culture into proponents of it.

Alexander points out that you can’t persecute your way out of a cycle of persecution. If you could, there wouldn’t be a cycle in the first place. He notes that punishing individuals for the aggregate sins of people sharing their political ideology is precisely the kind of “sins of the father” collective guilt against which conservatives have fought in other contexts for years. He also cautions that most of the time, a call to cancel someone is coming from inside the house — meaning that if a group adopts Cancel Culture as a norm, the people most frequently canceled will be the ones within that group. We’ve already seen enough of “the left eating its own” to know that’s the case.

Alexander also calls for a need to define Cancel Culture, and I want to weigh in on that because I think (“Toot! Toot!” goes my own horn!) Rikki and I already did a good job of defining the term in “Canceling”:

Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.

We also explain in subsequent chapters of “Canceling” that Cancel Culture should be seen as part of a larger strategy for “winning arguments without winning arguments” — in other words, defeating or scaring someone off before the discussion has even begun in earnest. Both the left and the right have their own versions of this basic tactic, which we call the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” and the “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress,” respectively. And of course there’s the discursive no-man’s land between these two edifices, which we call the “Obstacle Course” and the “Minefield.”

As Alexander points out in his piece, “defining [Cancel Culture] a little better is one of the intermediate steps in fighting it.” I wholeheartedly agree, and part of the reason I think we’ve had so much trouble is because we haven’t had one settled definition.

Here are five reasons why I believe my and Rikki’s definition of Cancel Culture is the best one to use:

1. Other definitions are either too vague or too unwieldy. 

There are plenty of great definitions of Cancel Culture that touch on the overall phenomenon in one way or another, but in my view they leave something to be desired.

For instance, I’ve long been a fan of

Jonathan Rauch

’s six-part checklist of signs to help determine whether or not Cancel Culture is at play: punitiveness, deplatforming, organization, secondary boycotts, moral grandstanding, and truthiness. However, because Rauch’s rubric has so many moving parts, it can sometimes be tricky to deploy. It can also exclude certain instances of Cancel Culture when they don’t follow the typical script.

Christina Hoff Sommers

also came up with an excellent definition that accurately describes the cultural trend. In her estimation, the term refers to “cases where individuals face absurdly harsh consequences for relatively minor lapses. Sometimes there are no lapses at all.” As I said, this frames the behavior of Cancel Culture very well, but remains vague about what I feel is its most important aspect: its effect on free speech.

2. Our definition is narrowly focused on speech. 

Just as words aren’t violence, being canceled for things you do (e.g., R. Kelly or Louis C.K.) isn’t the same thing as being canceled for things you say or think. That distinction is important, and I believe a good definition for Cancel Culture should refer primarily to speech.

That’s what I believe Cancel Culture really is: an attempt to police speech and ideas by making an example of anyone who voices dissent or questions the orthodoxy. The method is social ostracization and scorn, deplatforming, or pressure campaigns to get people fired, but the reason is “You hold and/or have voiced ideas or made jokes we do not like.” And of course the “we” here is, as Alexander points out, “whoever holds the levers of power.”

3. It’s a name for the current historical moment and highlights how social media makes this period of intolerance unique.

Alexander is correct in pointing out that the behavior underlying Cancel Culture is far from new and all-too-human. We can trace it back, as he does, through the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Salem Witch Trials, the Spanish Inquisition, and even ancient Egypt (always love a shout out for Akhenaten!).

But when we focus on the commonalities of these “mass censorship events” (as I've awkwardly called them) or of previous historical moral panics and witch hunts — both literal and figurative — we miss what makes Cancel Culture unique and why it exploded onto the scene not in 2005 but around 2014. We also miss the technological shift that made this possible: the mass adoption of social media and the moment when the first generation of junior high schoolers who grew up on it (and who learned how to use it to attack enemies) hit college campuses in large numbers around 2014.

Once upon a time, if you were angry at a journalist or a celebrity, you could write an angry letter to their boss or fan club. But first you had to find the address, which took much more effort than Googling. Then you had to write your letter, put it in an envelope, walk out to a mailbox to send it, and wait for a response — which in most cases you’d never receive. In all likelihood, the letter would just be stuck in a drawer and ignored. If you wanted to create a campaign to get that person fired or punished, you had to put in some real work. You had to leave your house, for one thing. You had to disseminate flyers, get people on the phone and persuade them to join you, organize rallies, and hold in-person meetings. You’d also have to sustain your anger and ire toward this person for a substantial length of time: not hours or even days, but weeks and possibly months. The time commitment itself would filter out more frivolous targets, because who has time to be that mad at a single person they don’t even know?

But in the age of social media all of this can be done in minutes, without leaving your house — or even your bed. With just a few posts online, you can almost instantly create an angry mob of hundreds or thousands of people (or at least the illusion of one) demanding that a person be fired immediately or there will be hell to pay. The instantaneousness of it changes everything.

This behavior, at this scale and velocity, was simply not possible before. And again, 2014 isn’t an arbitrary starting point. Focusing on college campuses for a moment, there have been more than 1,000 professor cancellation attempts since 2014, with two-thirds resulting in some form of sanction and one-fifth resulting in termination. That’s 200 professors who were fired or forced out. As we’ve mentioned many times before, this is twice as many as the standard estimate of professors fired during McCarthyism, more than three times as many as the professors fired for being communists, and — importantly — without any meaningful historical comparison, since First Amendment law that strongly protects the freedom of speech rights of students and professors was only established between 1957 and 1973.

What’s worse, we know these professor cancellation statistics are a gross underestimate. One in six professors report having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and 1 in 3 report having been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.

Even during the tumultuous period following 9/11, only about three professors lost their jobs for speech related to the attacks or the subsequent wars, and all three were fired for reasons that extended well beyond protected speech.

What we propose in “Canceling” is that, just like we call the first Red Scare “the first Red Scare” and the Victorian era “the Victorian era,” we should identify the time we’re living in as distinct — and we should call it by the name of the specific sort of intolerance we're seeing. The period beginning in 2014 and continuing to this day should be known as The Age of Cancel Culture.

We hope we can look back on it at some point and say, “Thank God that's over,” but we unfortunately don't seem to be quite there yet.

4. It incorporates the wisdom and nuance of First Amendment doctrine. 

As a First Amendment lawyer, free speech nerd, and president of FIRE, I’m obviously biased on this — but I think the First Amendment may be the most revolutionary and important law ever codified. And it’s necessary because, as the title of this Substack newsletter implies, free speech is an idea so radical that it is opposed in every generation, and it requires its proponents to constantly defend it.

There’s a social norm, respected by many other constitutional lawyers when visiting other countries, that we should not paint our Constitution or our First Amendment as superior to other countries' norms on freedom of speech. I believe this is a norm not simply because people want to be polite, but also because those constitutional lawyers often like the restrictions that are allowed in other countries.

When I’m traveling abroad, I violate that norm by proudly saying that American First Amendment law is the longest-sustained meditation by many of America's greatest legal minds on what it means to have freedom of speech in the real world — and that it has created not just a sensible and pragmatic body of law, but also one that is embedded with a tremendous amount of wisdom on the philosophy of free speech.

Even though the First Amendment largely restricts only government censorship, a lot of the philosophy underlying why we believe some speech should be protected and why some shouldn't is just as persuasive in a cultural context as it is in a legal one. So if we want a culture of freedom of speech — and I believe we should — we should draw from the wisdom of the First Amendment.

Additionally, while the First Amendment is downstream of a free speech culture (sorry Ken White), using it as the foundation of our definition of Cancel Culture gives us not only decades of jurisprudence to draw from, but also an ideal and more objective metric. If the First Amendment protects your speech (or would, if the speech were to have occurred in a context where the First Amendment applies), then it is Cancel Culture when people try to have you fired, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for that speech.

Now, one might argue that our definition requires an encyclopedic understanding of First Amendment law — one that the average person doesn’t have — and that this may be a downside. But that’s not true. A fairly basic understanding of First Amendment principles gets you where you need to be. It’s just that more knowledge, specifically, knowledge about decisions in First Amendment public employee law, gets you even more nuance. It also helps you navigate more complex questions, like the ones Alexander raises in his piece (as well as another one addressing free speech and free speech norms more broadly, which I may respond to as well at some point).

Here are a few things the First Amendment helps us understand with respect to Cancel Culture:

The heart of darkness is viewpoint or opinion discrimination.

As Rikki and I note in the appendix of “Canceling,” singling out a particular point of view for censorship while leaving other viewpoints on the same topic alone is among the most brazen forms of censorship.

If, for example, you create an environment in which people are free on their own time to say they support presidential candidate Kamala Harris, firing someone for saying that they support Trump just seems extra wrong. If, however, you have a general policy of keeping the work environment apolitical, that's a lot more defensible of a policy because it applies to everyone. That is similar to the requirement of viewpoint neutrality in a public forum, or the difference between content-based speech restrictions (which are rarely permitted and require strict scrutiny) and viewpoint-based speech restrictions (which are presumptively unconstitutional). Still, as we’ll discuss further below, employers who implement policies that restrict employees' ability to speak about matters of public concern when they're off the clock should have a very good reason for doing so.

The First Amendment is realistic about what different jobs entail.

There are, of course, considerations for particular jobs where certain speech can undermine your ability to do the job itself. For example, if your role is to advise and support students and you're discovered to be constantly talking about what a bunch of idiots they are, then it may not be Cancel Culture (or a surprise) if you’re fired over that. Alexander touches upon another good example in his piece regarding journalists saying something political even if they’re off the job. It’s entirely plausible that this behavior indicates an incapacity to be objective when covering a particular political candidate and poses a problem related directly to journalistic ethics.

First Amendment law can help us parse these cases and figure out what the ground rules should be. For example, taking it back to an analogy to First Amendment public employee law, which is often the most applicable: In Garcetti v. Ceballos, a deputy district attorney circulated a memo claiming that a sheriff lied on a search warrant. Given that this is a statement made by a public employee “pursuant to their official duties,” it shouldn't be surprising that this — which in another context might be considered private speech — was held against them by their employer.

On the other side of things, Pickering v. Board of Education may be the paradigmatic example of a case in which public employees should have the right to engage in discussions on matters of public concern even if those matters relate to the employee’s job. In Pickering, a high school science teacher was fired for publishing an article critical of the way the school allocated funds between academic and athletic programs. The Supreme Court found he could not be fired for off-the-job speech on a matter of public concern — particularly when it didn't undermine his basic function as an educator or the school district’s operation.

If a government employee’s personal speech on a matter of public concern doesn’t disrupt the workplace or hamper his ability to do his job, it’s likely protected — even if it’s controversial or causes offense. In Rankin v. McPherson, a case which is particularly instructive in the current moment, the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas police department clerk could not be fired for her comment about the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan (“Shoot, if they go for him again, I hope they get him”). The clerk made the comment in a private conversation with a coworker, and there was no evidence it disrupted the department’s functioning or made the clerk unfit for the job. Writing for the majority, Justice Thurgood Marshall noted the relevance of an employee’s role within an organization: “When, as here, an employee serves no confidential, policymaking, or public contact role, the danger to the agency's successful functioning from that employee's private speech is minimal.” FIRE’s Aaron Terr and

Alex Morey

recently wrote a great piece on this topic for FIRE’s blog.

Outside of the public employee law context, defamation law also brings in some useful distinctions applicable when talking about a matter of public concern as opposed to a matter of purely private concern. Talking about issues of public concern is considered to be somewhat more important and therefore more protected. Calling out a coworker for something in their private life, on the other hand, might be considered crossing a line and therefore not protected. Similarly, there’s a public interest in disclosing a senate candidate’s COVID-19 diagnosis, for example, because it is likely to impact his or her ability to campaign; but there’s probably less of a public interest in disclosing a candidate’s chlamydia diagnosis, unless they practice an extremely unorthodox method of campaigning (HT to

Adam Goldstein

for that joke). 

The point here is that First Amendment jurisprudence provides a philosophical roadmap for analyzing what is and is not Cancel Culture. And a lot of what First Amendment jurisprudence is arguing for is a fair amount of common sense as well as the embodiment of some of our moral intuitions as to what is and isn't appropriate, or is or isn't commendable, in a workplace or personal relationship.

The First Amendment also helps us think through what kinds of speech should not be protected. 

Something you’ll hear all the time when discussing this stuff is that the speech in question is “not free speech.” Well, if we ground our definition of Cancel Culture in First Amendment logic, we have clear ways out of that quagmire.

Indeed, there are certain types of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. These include (among others) true threats, incitement to imminent lawless action, copyright infringement, and defamation. Borrowing from the wisdom embodied in First Amendment law to make these distinctions clearer can help us be more precise in identifying whether or not the consequences of someone’s speech should be considered Cancel Culture.

5. It situates Cancel Culture as part of a larger set of anti-discourse tactics.

As I mentioned earlier, Cancel Culture belongs to a greater constellation of behaviors designed to “win arguments without actually winning arguments.” The idea is to simply silence the opposition before they have the chance to deliver a point that requires addressing.

Think of Cancel Culture as the military arm of the Anti-Discourse Industrial Complex. 

This larger context is important because the goal of Cancel Culture isn’t simply to punish opponents or apostates. It’s also about controlling the discourse, enforcing conformity, and silencing dissent. The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress on the right and the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress on the left, along with the Obstacle Course and Minefield, are all ways to shut conversations down. Cancel Culture is the way to shut you down if you say the wrong thing or step out of line. The cumulative effect is an environment where orthodoxy is never questioned because the consequences are so great that you’d have to be socially suicidal to try.

And while anyone in favor of free speech and open discourse (not to mention anyone aware of their own ignorance and capacity for bias and blindness) would recoil at such an environment, it’s easy to see why it’s so appealing to the activists and extremists on either end of the culture war. Imagine how many arguments you would never have if nobody felt safe to disagree with you. With all that pesky dialogue out of the way, you could get on with the project of making your unquestionably good and flawless political and ideological mission a reality.

It’d be perfect, if it wasn’t obviously dangerous, regressive, and monstrous!

Despite all this, remember that Cancel Culture is about ‘culture.’

For those of us trying to make sense of this moment and find ways to be as objective, organized, and helpful as possible when addressing Cancel Culture, there is one thing we simply have to accept: Nothing we come up with will be, or should ever be, as clear and absolute as a legal definition. After all, we’re talking about culture, and culture is constantly in flux. That means that regardless of how helpful First Amendment law and jurisprudence is as we try to identify and understand Cancel Culture, our understanding of the phenomenon must still be flexible.

In our discourse about this behavior, we aren’t arguing whether or not a private company can fire someone: We’re arguing whether or not they should. Sometimes the answer is “Yes.” Other times, it’s “No.” And it requires a healthy cultural discourse to determine which answer is closest to correct. For example, when a journalist like Dave Weigel at the Washington Post retweets a slightly naughty joke, he certainly can be suspended. But there should also be people arguing that he shouldn’t be, because that action verges on saying that someone in his position can’t have an off-the-clock personality. But, then again, there are other considerations — such as a media corporation considering one of its journalists’ personalities a “brand” and part of the corporation’s own brand by association.

The important thing to ask in these cases is, “What if everyone did this? Where would we end up as a culture?” Yes, a private company firing someone for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement may be within its rights. But this action raises the specter of a more atomized and plutocratic society in which one’s livelihood depends on agreeing with one’s boss’ political stances — in which people only work for and with other people that they totally agree with. If done everywhere, that brings people uncomfortably close to a situation in which they can have an individual political opinion or a job, but not both.

This is a critical conversation — one we need to have to remind the rest of the population what’s really at stake. Many proponents of Cancel Culture (including more recent right-leaning ones) prefer to label it as “consequence culture,” but they don’t seem to take the particular consequences I’ve raised here very seriously. It is myopia to think that you will always be not just right, but in power and in good company. If we abandon principle when it’s convenient, it is that same lack of principle that will bury us in the end.

As many, including FIRE, have said, “Cancel Culture cancels culture.” At the end of the day, we have to decide what our culture will be like and how we want to live within it. In “Canceling,” Rikki and I point out the way our idioms convey our cultural norms. We used to say things like, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” “It’s a free country,” “Who am I to judge?” and “Different strokes for different folks,” much more often than we do now, and our culture reflects that.

We should consider collectively bringing those idioms back with greater emphasis so our culture can begin to reflect something we’re more comfortable seeing.

Special thanks to

Angel Eduardo

and

Adam Goldstein

for their work on this epic post!

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

And now for something more amusing (though still pretty crazy):

Did you know that the FBI once spent two-and-a-half years “investigating” a pop song for obscenity? Well, it did — and if you’ve never heard this story before you might think it was some gangster rap or heavy metal song. But it wasn’t.

It was the 1963 recording of “Louie Louie” by Kingsman.

Here’s FIRE Senior Counsel Robert Corn-Revere breaking the story down: